Marketing agency sees a 180° in deliverability with Hunter

Meet Acevox

Acevox is a marketing agency that historically specialized in higher education, running enrollment campaigns for community colleges, universities, and trade schools. 

Over the past two years, Acevox has focused on expanding its reach into adjacent and growing industries, driven by the marketing team, namely its Marketing and Communications Manager, Samantha Litten, and Social Media & Content Coordinator, Zoe Toumasis.

Today, they are actively targeting new markets, including nonprofits, local businesses, elder care, and pet care.

The challenge

When targeting higher education, Acevox found that gathering contact information was straightforward, as staff emails and phone numbers were publicly listed on college and university websites. 

However, as the agency pivoted to expand its industry base, it hit a wall.

They quickly realized that organizations like nonprofits do not always list their contact information publicly online. 

The ultimate goal of Acevox's outreach is to book meetings and discovery calls, which requires speaking to a specific person on a marketing or development team. 

Samantha, the agency's Marketing Director, would outline an outreach strategy, and the team would then scour Google, company websites, and Instagram to hunt down contact details.

LinkedIn manual research supplemented their prospecting, but it didn’t scale: either portions of their target audience couldn’t be found on the platform, or when a profile was found, contact information was missing.

Unfortunately, these searches frequently led them to generic, catch-all inboxes. 

"There was a lot of back and forth between sites and profiles, trying to find specific information."

Zoe Toumasis, Social Media & Content Coordinator, Acevox

As a lean team, the manual hunt for correct contact details was repetitive, tedious, and non-value-add.

The solution

To build a more efficient pipeline outside of the higher education industry, Acevox brought in Hunter to source reliable email addresses and phone numbers:

1. Strategic planning: Samantha relies heavily on the Hunter Chrome extension while browsing company websites to quickly determine if an organization has easily accessible contact data. This helps her forecast how efficient an outreach campaign will be for specific lead categories.
2. Targeted sourcing: Zoe uses Hunter’s Email Finder to pinpoint specific employee information without endlessly clicking between profiles. Because they operate as a lean team prioritizing quality over quantity, they typically source and reach out to just one person per company at a time.
3. Verification and outreach: After dealing with email deliverability issues last year, the team now actively uses Hunter’s Verifier to confirm that the emails they find are accurate and up to date. Verified leads are then placed into tailored, three-email sequences based on specific services or pain points.

The results

Implementing Hunter has fundamentally streamlined Acevox's business development workflow. By moving away from manual searching and utilizing Hunter's specific tools, the agency has successfully optimized its resources.

• Massive time savings: Hunter cut prospecting time by 50% when locating a specific prospect's contact information.
• Deliverability turnaround: After struggling with bounce rates, integrating Hunter’s verification tool helped them to clean their data, creating a 180° in deliverability, responses, and open rates
• Process efficiency: Hunter reduced the constant back-and-forth between websites, making the overall process much less tedious for the team.

When asked to quantify the value Hunter has brought to Acevox as they expand their reach into new markets, Samantha explained:

"I use the Chrome extension a lot, and I use it while browsing to quickly understand if this is the right target company, if it’s in the right category, and if we should reach out to them." 

Samantha Litten, Marketing and Communications Manager, Acevox

The takeaway

For Acevox, Hunter has turned a highly repetitive, frustrating roadblock into a smooth, predictable process. 

It helps a lean team to carefully plan their industry expansion while maintaining a high standard of outreach quality.

As Zoe summarized, using Hunter simply saves time by keeping her from staring at screens all day.

As Samantha says:

"I'd say [Hunter] cuts time in half when you're trying to find someone's contact information."